Scarcity, Abundance and Finding Your Own Way to Fail

“Let’s run an experiment and see what happens.” I say these words at least twice a week with complete freedom. Not just the freedom to take the risk, but the freedom from being attached in any way to the outcomes. Sure, I have my hunch. I’ve been doing this awhile, after all. But in this scenario, my expertise counts for very little; I am not the audience, and the audience is the expert in finding new and creative ways to confound me. The secret is that this is what actually makes it exciting.

An organization where you are free to run as many experiments as you need to, to test and iterate out in the world in full view of your audience, to blow up something that’s been proven effective on the chance that something else might work even better, sounds like creative utopia. As the executive director of a 10-year-old, all-volunteer participatory community library, I get to experience this every day. In my day job.

I work as a user experience designer for websites and apps, where generating ideas for the sole purpose of watching half of them fail (and then watching the next generation of ideas replace those that just succeeded) is not only the job description, but part of the culture. We celebrate the failures because it means we made a leap, we overshot, we pushed the button for the future and the elevator just wasn’t ready to stop on that floor yet.

I spend a lot of time thinking about why I revel in my failures as a designer and why they can be so debilitating as an executive director and founder. Why temporarily disappointing users is what I get paid for and why the prospect of disappointing our community is a paralyzing jolt straight to my heart. I think a lot of it comes down to the cultural conditions around each.

Design & Tech Conditions:

Be bold, take risks.

Fail fast.

Fail often.

It’s not finished? Not functional? Not in color? Test it anyway.

You are not your ideas and your worth is not tied to their success.

Small Arts Organization Conditions:

Be bold, take risks.

Plan meticulously to secure funding. Be sure to budget for the exact number of failures you anticipate.

Attempt to control for every variable (and invent some imaginary ones, just to be safe). Perfect and polish, because this may be the only shot you get.

You can fail, but not too big. And definitely not in public, or your city will disown you.

When things don’t work out, keep yourself up at night wondering, “Is my idea bad, or am I just bad at my job?”

Notice first that neither of these sets of conditions are actually about who we claim to care for: the user, the audience, or the community. Both are rooted in messages that I’ve heard often from other folks in these fields, some of which I’ve painfully internalized more than others.

The first set comes from a place of abundance; the design and tech sectors are flush, and hundreds of these failures will only make them flusher. But they also come from a place of privilege, where a safety net is automatically assumed. The “risk” inherent in failure isn’t quite as big of a risk as we pride ourselves on taking.

The second is reflective of scarcity, the toxic thinking that can be mistaken for pragmatism when you’ve made your home in that mindset for too long — as many small, under-resourced organizations do. There is no room in those destructively high expectations to nurture healthy growth.

But they do plainly detail how much greater the cost of failure is without a safety net. Not having enough room to fail leads to paralysis around failure leads to feeling like a failure. After a while, it’s easy to see how these conditions become self-reinforcing and why one might start bypassing “Be bold, take risks” in the interest of less brutal options.

Of course, there is a massive middle ground to explore between “failure is the end of everything” and “if you’re not failing, you’re not innovating,” which is also unhelpful and reductive as a bar to meet for organizations working to scale or stabilize. I don’t know where that sweet spot is yet, but I’m looking forward to finding it.

Comments

Thanks for this thread on failure – very valuable. The articulation of failure in terms of failing project>failing organisation>person as failure, the slippage in scales of failure, very well articulated in the article, is parallel in art school teaching where it’s difficult to talk to a student about failure (an incredibly important part of the pedagogy for all the reasons this piece and the one on music improvisation articulates) when in their mind a failed work slips up to a failed course and slips up again to a failed person. Our research is written up in iJade and ref here https://openair.rgu.ac.uk/handle/10059/1412

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About the author

Nell Taylor

Nell Taylor is the founder and executive director of Read/Write Library and a digital strategy and media consultant specializing in user experience, data, and discovery strategies from a human-centered research and design perspective.
Nell has consulted on a wide range of projects ranging from websites for global NGOs and Fortune 500 brands to arts data mapping tools, and was a staff blogger for the Poetry Foundation as well as co-founder of the annual 4,000-attendee Printers’ Ball, a participatory small press celebration.
Previously, she lead planning, research, and communications at an art studio that produced interactive video installations for Esquire, Qualcomm, Sundance Film Festival, and the National Portrait Gallery. Read/Write Library has been featured in The New York Times and NPR's All Things Considered and Nell has presented at SXSW Interactive, TEDActive, MIT, UNC, Code4Lib, ORD Camp, and the Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities and Computer Science among ...

About Field Notes

Field Notes is a means of amplifying and widening the conversations the NAS team has with leaders in the field and experts outside the field. The entire staff will contribute our observations and insights and share a commitment to providing something useful, useable. We see our job here as mining, distilling and contextualizing ideas; providing the morals of these stories, the frameworks that anyone can use; and offering everyone in the field the opportunity to discuss the underlying issues.